e hadn't told him yet, though it was over a fortnight
since her visit to the doctor.

She had no reasoned explanation of her postponement of it. The instinct
that led her to keep it wholly to herself, was probably one of the
reflections of that morning with Portia. She was still in a penitential
mood when she went to the doctor--a mood which the contemplation of
Portia's frustrated life and her own undeservedly happy one, had bitten
deep into her soul. It was a mood that nothing but pain could satisfy.
The only relief she could get during that fortnight of packing and
leave-taking, came in flogging herself to do hard things--things that
hurt, physically and literally, I mean; that made her back ache and
cramped the muscles of her arms. Her spiritual aches were too
contemptible to pay any attention to.

Conversely, in that mood, the thing she couldn't endure, that made her
want to scream, was precisely what, all her life, she had taken for
granted; tenderness, concern, the smoothing away of little difficulties
for which the people about her had always sacrificed themselves. That
mood made it hard to go to the doctor. But, after she had fainted dead
away twice in one morning, a saving remnant of common sense--the
reflection that if there were anything organically wrong with her, it
would be a poor trick to play on Rodney, not to take remedial measures
as soon as possible--dictated the action.

When the doctor told her what had happened, she was a little bewildered.
She hadn't, in her mind, any prepared background for the news. She and
Rodney had decided at the beginning not to have any children for the
first year or two--in view of Rose's extreme youth, the postponement
seemed sensible--and the decision once made, neither of them had thought
much more about it.

Rodney's vigorously objective mind had always been so fully occupied
with things as they were that it found little leisure for speculation
on things as they might be. The day's work was always so vividly
absorbing to him that day-dreams never got a chance. His sex impulses
had always been crowded down to the smallest possible compass, not
because he was a Puritan, but because he was, spiritually and mentally,
an athlete. He had never thought of marriage as a serious possibility,
Frederica's efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, until, in a moment
of bewilderment, he found himself head over ears in love with Rose
Stanton. That this emotion had been able to f